Pews Tirelessly Restored, and an Immigrant Redeemed

Fabian Cervantes at Our Lady of Refuge Catholic Church in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he helped repair 37 rows of pews.Credit
Brian Harkin for The New York Times

On a Sunday morning last summer, Fabian Cervantes walked through the doors of Our Lady of Refuge, the Roman Catholic church in Brooklyn that he had lost hope of ever seeing again. His arms were pale from seven months in jail. His clothes hung limply because he had lost 25 pounds. His sallow eyes attested to scores of sleepless nights.

He picked his way up the central aisle, passing the regulars at the 8:30 a.m. Spanish-language Mass, the people who had prayed for him. Then, from the altar, he began to tell the story of his return. His best friend in the congregation, Sammy Cruz, considered it a miracle, one that he believed had something to do with the way he and Mr. Cervantes had restored every single pew in the church.

When did the story begin? On the day in early 2003 when Mr. Cervantes walked across the desert from Mexico into the United States? The bitter February night, his first in New York, when he wound up sleeping in the subway? The day when that Colombian man took pity on him and offered him a job and a basement bed? The day when he happened to walk past Our Lady of Refuge and heard Spanish being spoken and went inside to give thanks?

However Mr. Cervantes’s odyssey started, by the summer of 2010 he had created a stable life for himself, or at least as stable a life as an immigrant without papers can have. He had an apartment of his own. He worked steadily in construction — sometimes carpentry, sometimes drywall — for $70 a day, and on those modest wages, he managed to send $300 a month to relatives back home.

During that summer, the pastor of Our Lady of Refuge, the Rev. Michael A. Perry, mentioned that he wanted to fix the pews. There were 37 rows, installed when the church had been built 76 years earlier, and their original oak was by this time hidden beneath seven coats of paint. That paint, in turn, was cracked and chipped and water-damaged. Mr. Perry had gotten an estimate for restoration: $100,000, way beyond anything a parish of working-class immigrants could afford.

“Tell Father Perry this is nothing,” Mr. Cervantes, 50, told Mr. Cruz, a retired sanitation worker. “I can do this.”

So Mr. Cervantes and Mr. Cruz undertook the work. They began at 6 most weeknights, after Mr. Cervantes had finished his construction work. They finished as late as 2 the next morning. Sometimes they had a dozen other volunteers. Often, they had just each other.

Six rows each night, they did battle with the accreted paint, going at it with coarse 60-grit sandpaper, then 120-grit to level out the worst gouges, then 220-grit to smooth the surface for coatings of stain and shellac. The accumulated dust filled two garbage bags every shift.

“This is rough,” Mr. Cervantes said one time to Mr. Cruz.

“We can’t stop now,” Mr. Cruz replied.

They did not stop until Nov. 29, 2011, barely a week before their target date, the parish’s 100th anniversary, on Dec. 8. (The original frame building was replaced in 1934 by the current church, at Foster and Ocean Avenues in the Flatbush neighborhood, built of granite in the French Gothic style.) The oak pews gleamed golden, never more so than on the December day when Mexican immigrants like Mr. Cervantes celebrated the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

A few weeks later, he traveled back to Mexico to buy a car, which he needed to get to construction jobs. Passing outside Pittsburgh on the way east, his car collided with another. When the police came and asked for his license, Mr. Cervantes had to admit he had none. Registration? None. Passport? None.

He went to the Allegheny County Jail, the holding pen for nearly 3,000 people accused of crimes ranging from public intoxication to murder. Mr. Cervantes’s otherwise minor offense, driving without a license, looked more than sufficient for him to be deported.

Father Perry, the pastor, and the jail’s Catholic chaplain, Deacon Thomas J. O’Neill, tried to find an immigration lawyer to take the case. The required retainer, about $6,000, far exceeded anything Mr. Cervantes or his four grown daughters, two of whom have moved to New York, could pay. So his case fell to a public defender, Amy Lindberg, and the congregation at Our Lady of Refuge raised $500 for Mr. Cervantes’s seat on a deportation flight.

After a brief hearing in late July 2012, the county court found Mr. Cervantes guilty on the charge of driving without a license. He was remanded to an immigration detention center in Pittsburgh to await the forced repatriation. Then something unexpected happened, something for which nobody — not Mr. Cervantes, Father Perry, Deacon O’Neill or Ms. Lindberg — has a firm legal explanation. The immigration authorities released Mr. Cervantes.

As best anyone involved in the case can surmise, the officials were using the discretion given to them by President Obama under a policy change announced in August 2011. It permitted immigration prosecutors to suspend deportation proceedings against immigrants whose sole crime was being in the United States illegally.

Outside the detention center, Mr. Cervantes dropped to his knees beside a tree and prayed. During his months in jail, he had read the Bible, turning repeatedly to the story of Joseph — Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers, Joseph miraculously redeemed.

On the next Sunday, he walked into Our Lady of Refuge, a kind of Joseph. This week, a free man, he again marked the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And he kept a particular promise.

“Do you really like God?” Mr. Cruz had asked him once during the months of captivity.

“Yes,” Mr. Cervantes had replied.

“Then pray to him,” Mr. Cruz said. “He’s the best lawyer you could have.”

Email: sgf1@columbia.edu

A version of this article appears in print on December 15, 2012, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Pews Tirelessly Restored, and an Immigrant Redeemed. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe